Verizon Community Relations
Verizon uses their foundation, Verizon Foundation, as a venue to build relations, trust, and strong relationships within the community.
“Verizon Foundation offers many opportunities for Verizon employees to get involved in their communities. Through Verizon Volunteers, Verizon employees donate thousands of hours each year to a variety of local nonprofit organizations. In 2009, Verizon Volunteers volunteered more than 700,000 hours, supporting communites and causes most important to them. The generous volunteer spirit of Verizon employees continues to ehnance quality of life in neighborhoods throughout the country.” (Verizon.com)
The foundation website is extremely useful and aesthetically pleasing. They include features that are changed in a timely manner as well as features of videos and examples of community actions taken by Verizon Foundation along the sides for viewers to click on and read more about. Finally, it is extremely helpful and interesting that at the very top of the page the first thing you see when you log on to it is the mission and core initiatives of the Verizon Foundation written out.
The core initiatives of the Verizon Foundation are:
For example, they frequently spotlight workers who motivate their local teams and make personal efforts to support causes they are specifically interested in that relate to the core initiatives. For example, a current spotlight on their site spotlights Kimberly Jenkins who has worked to help improve the quality of life in her neighborhood and quality of learning in the middle school she attended.
The core initiatives of the Verizon Foundation are:
Education and Literacy
“Our goal: To improve and strengthen educational achievement for children and adults by preparing them for success in the 21st Century.”
Verizon uses Thinkfinity, a web site that provides lesson plans for teachers to refer to for grades K-12. There are also interactive videos and an advanced search engine
This is a useful tool that relates to Verizon’s core mission of communications by helping reach their education and literacy goal via an interactive website
Safety and Health
Our goal: To increase safety, advance healthcare and improve quality of life for individuals and families in every community.
Verizon works to do these things by providing financial, human, and technical support to programs and organizations that:
§ “Prevent domestic violence through education and provide victim relief and empowerment to individuals and families.
§ Help underserved populations access information on critical health issues.
§ Increase the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare providers.
§ Improve the lives of people with disabilities.
§ Teach children and adults how to use the Internet safely.
One of the special things about Verizon’s community relations efforts is that they allow participants to choose what organizations their “local team” of Verizon volunteers wishes to sponsor.
For example, they frequently spotlight workers who motivate their local teams and make personal efforts to support causes they are specifically interested in that relate to the core initiatives. For example, a current spotlight on their site spotlights Kimberly Jenkins who has worked to help improve the quality of life in her neighborhood and quality of learning in the middle school she attended.
Overall, the Verizon Foundation not only builds strong relationship within surrounding communities, but also promotes hands-on philanthropic service from their employees that benefit the community while advancing their good reputation. This is not only smart of Verizon but is pleasing to their employees and gives them a true sense of involvement while simaltaneously doing good in the community and developing strong ties.
